We completed marathoning the three seasons of the TV show right before watching the movie.

Rewatching the show, I was reminded of the things I had loved about it the first time around: the incredibly witty dialog, the soap-opera relationships, the humor, the conflict, and the cliffhangers.

One thing I had completely forgotten: how the third season just...ends.

Veronica Mars, the show, needed and deserved this movie. And it gets the movie it deserves. A lot has changed and nothing has changed. Lots of things happen and, in a way, nothing happens. But it truly is a proper ending to the series and it's a huge treat for fans.

Quite frankly, I think the recap portion at the beginning of the movie was a mistake. If you don't already know the backstory, it won't help. If you don't remember the backstory, it won't help. And if you do know the backstory, it won't help.

I would be very curious to hear the opinion of anyone who saw this cold. I can't imagine it making much of an impact. Oh, it's a really great script and a wonderful, long "Season 4" episode, if you will. But I can't imagine it makes a very good stand-alone movie.

In that way, Veronica Mars is perhaps not to Veronica Mars as Serenity is to Firefly (I actually did see the movie before the show in that instance, and I loved it). But that's okay.

I had the lowest possible expectations going into The Croods. The cover and title of this animation reminds me of many a direct-to-video animation abomination.

The movie grew on me as it played out in ways that genuinely surprised me. The animation is clever and engaging. The voice acting is great. The story is serviceable. There are character arcs.

But the thing that really blew me away were the fantastic conceptual design elements: the bizarre character styles (Eep is squat, muscular, and yet strangely sexy), the brilliant all-stops-pulled creature designs, and the slow buildup of color from monotonous earth tones to a spectacular fluorescent rainbow as the movie progresses.

It's not perfect by any stretch, but all of the nascent elements of a really good family adventure movie are in there. Enough to make it slightly more than just a satisfying visual feast.

A whole bunch of human meat goes into a building. At first, it's mostly perforated with small pieces of lead. Then it is stabstabstabbed a lot. And finally, it is punched and kicked and SLAMMED into the walls and floors and ceilings until all of the juices spurt out.

They had the meat talk, which was interesting. But mostly, it grunted and dripped, which I preferred.

I think what really makes this spectacle of violence effective is not just the fight choreography - which is very good and very inventive (important!), but also the camera work. The camera moves with the punches and the slams and the crunches in a way that makes you, the viewer, feel as though you're going along for the short, brutal ride into the wall or the floor or the fist. It's not overdone at all. It's not subtle, per se, but it's not screaming for attention, either. It's just very, very effective.

Anything involving...anything in this movie is implausible. But you'd be a fool to care. One scene (and you'll have no difficulty guessing which one, if you've seen this) had me saying, "that wouldn't work for at least six different reasons, but I'm enjoy myself immensely nonetheless!"

When the meat stops moving, they shut off the cameras and roll credits. Simple, effective, but will never rise over 3.5 stars.

I read the novel quite recently. Imagine my surprise when this animation showed up in the first couple pages of Amazon Prime popular videos on the Xbox. Just imagine it. Like a storm of dark surprise creeping over a vast, gray lake of cold water.

You can definitely tell that author Peter Beagle also wrote the screenplay. Though missing a significant piece of the story (which turns out to not have been quite as pivotal as I would have thought), the animation remains extremely true to the novel. Even the singing isn't out of place at all, since the novel also included songs and poetry.

The animation is quite good for the period. It's fluid and has a pretty interesting style. The only thing that I didn't like at all were Molly Grue's eyes. They were too damn big - much larger than Schmendrick's and they sometimes pointed in weird directions, becoming cross-eyed or with one staring crazily off to the side like a chameleon. It was distracting. Everything else is pretty great.

I was worried it might be a little too scary for our little kiddo, but she braved through it just fine. At under two years, she may just not yet be old enough to know she should be frightened of harpies and giant bulls composed of living flame. When it was over, she asked for "more unicorns."

The voice acting is above par and you'll notice some famous names in the opening credits. They're easy to detect in the movie, as well. A surprise stand-out for me was Rene Auberjonois as an awesome and hilarious Skull. I only know Auberjonois as Odo from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (and even there only vaguely.)

In summary, if you're willing to watch anything featuring an animated unicorn, I imagine you could do way worse than The Last Unicorn.

I came to this after watching and loving the BBC series. It was utterly surreal to see the same main character in the same town with different (but similar) characters and in different (but similar) situations and have entirely different (but similar) reactions to it all!

Martin Clunes is clearly younger in this and he plays a more jovial, younger Doc Martin character. It could actually be a prequel to the series if it were science fiction and aliens wiped his mind and changed the name of the town and replaced its inhabitants with close facsimiles in order to use Doc Martin to fulfill the ancient prophecy of a star-spanning alien empire.

The story is cute and funny, as you'd expect. Fans of the series will certainly enjoy it, but I'd hesitate to recommend it as stand-alone entertainment to just anyone I encounter on the street.

Finally, a biopic with the balls to tell the truth about the goddamn werewolves! My family has been fighting those things for four generations. We've been bitten. We've gotten some polio. We've even had to put down some of our own. But the most painful thing we've ever had to deal with is the complete coverup in the official histories!

I don't much care for the comedic elements in this movie. The first third of FDR: American Badass was side-splittingly funny. And that didn't sit right with me. But for the final two thirds, they pretty much played it straight. Not funny at all. And I really appreciated it. It makes sense, too: get people into the movie with the big laughs and all the "good stuff". Then, when they're interested, show them what really happened and teach them some history! Sure, that makes the last two thirds pretty straight-laced and boring despite all of the werewolves, but that's what history is! And it's goddamn important!

I really love this style of drama: one that hints at things in a way that allows you to put together the story on your own. It's not a terribly difficult puzzle, per se, but it has tons of really interesting characters. Trying to correctly guess their individual motivations is a lot of the fun.

Bill Nighy was carefully constructed in a secret underground laboratory to act with droll understatement, and it fits his character quite well, I think. Being an intelligence officer, it makes plenty of sense that he'd have had years of experience keeping his cards close to his chest. His brow wrinkles when he's thinking and he gets a faint little smile when he's getting the upper hand, but you almost have to look for the reactions of other characters to try to get a sense of what's going on.

Characters with cards more openly played were very fun to watch as well. I liked Rachel Weisz as Nancy Pierpan, the pretty lady who just happens to live across the hall from a spy, and the menacing Prime Minister played by Ralph Fiennes. I really didn't care for Fiennes until I saw him throwing things around in In Bruges, which changed everything.

The conclusion is satisfying and yet still manages to be open-ended enough to leave room for your own conjecture. In my opinion, that's just about ideal.

Oh how I miss this kind of movie. Or maybe not this kind of movie so much as I miss watching this kind of movie. I no longer watch but a tiny fraction of the b-horror that made up my young adult curriculum.

Black Sheep fleeced my heart with its small-scale story, it's humor, it's humanity, and it's good-for-the-budget effects. I just started watching the first season of the BBC's Monarch of the Glen last night and the similarities between that and this are striking: prodigal son returns to the homestead to find that all is not well with the estate. He falls for a pretty liberal do-gooder and battles mutant sheep while befriending the colorful local personalities. That's about where the similarities end, at least for the first two episodes of Monarch. For all I know, I'm only an episode away from seeing our newly-bonded couple falling into a bloody slick pit of discarded mutant sheep offal.

Casual viewers might see Black Sheep as a gonzo horror gore flick, but for those of us who can quote Dead Alive (aka Brain Dead) by heart, it's quite restrained. A sort of 'date movie' version of your favorite gore busters of the days of yore. Wonderful fun for everyone!

Poor Hayden Christensen. Maybe he's a terrible fucking actor. But he's definitely been in some movies with really horrible scripts. The Star Wars prequels, obviously. But this...I don't know what a really talented actor would have done with this script. I really don't.

I loved the concept. I loved the origin story.

Samuel L. Jackson's character was an early low point for me. I'm pretty sure they popped that character right out of its cardboard-backed blister pack fresh from the toy store and put it right into the movie. It's a toy action villain with nothing interesting to say or do except wear its little outfit and use the included gadgets and weapons. It comes to the set, somebody pulls the cord on the back to make it speak its lines, and then it goes home.

Then we get to the adult Jumper's life. In many ways, it makes sense that he's jumped his way completely out of a personality - making no attachments and putting down almost no roots in the human world. But that doesn't explain why his hometown reunion and first conversation with his old love interest is so fucking boring and painful to watch that we (and please understand that this is almost a first in my entire life watching a movie 'cause I've sat through some of the world's longest, worst scenes) fast-forwarded through it!

I have literally not seen (or fast-forwarded through) anything like it before in my life and don't ever expect to again.

Maybe I was watching the non-chemistry of two or three of the worst actors that have ever lived. Or it was the script. Or the director. Or what I had just eaten. Who knows? But I wanted, right at that moment, so bad, to be a jumper so that I could get as far as geographically possible away from that fucking sequence of moving pictures!

Getting back to the conceptual elements, I really enjoyed the almost supernatural non-relationship Jumper has with his Dad, Michael Rooker: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, played by Michael Rooker. That whole interaction was clever and funny in a bittersweet sort of way. Conceptually, it was as if a thing lifted from a much better movie.

Likewise the desert hideaway - a brilliant concept completely wasted by all involved. So many great ideas ruined! I mourn for the loss of these ideas.

I now present my Jumper fanfic which is way better than the actual movie:

Humper: Coitus Interruptus

The stylish young couple lay in lounge chairs by the edge of the pool. The evening was cooling off into dusk and they would soon be moving inside to the warmth of the gas fireplace. A gentle salty breeze came slowly over them from the ocean, bringing with it the damp and a chill reminder of the coming night.

"I'm ready to go in," said the woman with a lazy smile. Her paperback book had lay splayed on the cement unread by her hand for most of the afternoon. She lifted it and replaced a laminated bookmark with a quote by Confucius.

"I'll get the fire going," said the young man. "You can open the wine and..."

With a blast of displaced air that threw the man into the pool and tipped the woman onto her back, Humper appeared betwixt the pair. He was wearing a tailored gray suit and carried with him air heavy with the smell of freshly-baked bread.

"I'm sorry, but I seem to..."

"Aaaaaah!" screamed the woman. Humper looked down at her. She was college-aged and attractive. Her bathing suit was modest, but flattering.

"Hey there, I'm sorry, really, I..."

"Aaaaah!" she screamed again. She was scrambling to get up, but her leg was caught at an awkward angle and she kept scooting back with each falling attempt.

Humper popped forward with a Jump and appeared on top of her, his crotch pressing tightly against her hip.

"I'm trying to apologize," he said quietly into her ear. The whites of her eyes flashed back at him in the increasingly dim light like beacons of fear. He realized his hand was cupped around her shapely breast. He could feel the beating of her heart beneath the thin fabric of the top.

"Hey! What the hell? Get off of her!" came a sputtering voice from the pool. The man had managed get his bearings and swim to the tile lip and was starting to pull himself out of the water.

An ear-splitting crack froze them all in place. Searing hot daggers of electrical force, or something like electrical force pierced the air where Humper had first appeared between the pair of lounge chairs. The metal in the chairs hummed with excited particles and their vinyl straps drooped with the sudden heat. Purple-white strobes of light flashed across the ground, casting frightening shadows upward onto the walls of the home and on the trees across the yard. In their place stood a large figure.

"I've got you, Humper!" said a booming baritone. It was Samuel L. Jackson. "Damn, boy, what are you doing on that pretty girl? You better not being trying to fuck her on Samuel L. Jackson's watch!"

I came to Dredd to judge it, but I think it judged me. I hope I was found worthy.

I had to check out cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle's IMDB page to see what else he'd done. A pretty good-sized list of things I'd never seen except 28 Days Later, Slumdog, and Antichrist. Ah, Antichrist, yes, that was an amazing-looking movie. This is a man to watch. Top-freaking-notch sci-fi visuals in Dredd. And not just the obvious stuff. I found myself completely drawn to the incredible use of color - like yellow lights streaming out of a floor vent. Or something red flickering on a ceiling in the background. But it wasn't distracting or overdone. It was colorful and vibrant in just the right amount.

Enough about the visuals. There is so much more.

Ma-Ma is no Ledger's Joker. But she's memorable. More than good enough for a bloody sci-fi action film. Dredd himself is absolutely perfect (though I'm saying that as someone who has long been familiar with the Judge's visuals, but has never actually read a page of the comic book). His calm demeanor was wonderfully scripted and played. Seriously, this is one of the best portrayals of a "one dimensional" brute I've ever seen. He's absolutely professional in the most awesome possible way: neither the stereotype of the guy who "does everything by the book" nor the stereotype of the guy who "doesn't play by the rules." Just absolutely, completely, utterly professional.

Finally, I was head-over-heels to see a fledgling female character that managed to completely avoid the sci-fi character extremes of: completely incompetent or (worse) way too competent. She's merely competent. And in a completely believable way, given her abilities. I haven't seen a female sci-fi character this well written since Ripley. I'm not kidding.

Dredd keeps the story tight and controlled. It paints a scenario without heavy use of exposition. It's surprisingly good in so many ways. I love it.

A lot of work clearly went into this. The informative graphic sequences were very well done and entertaining. The interviews covered a broad range of pinball aficionados: collectors, players, and creators.

I wish more emphasis had been on the excitement of the games themselves and less on the oddities of some of the collectors and superfans. I got the impression that the camera was looking for kooky characters to exploit and never really found anyone quite interesting enough to stick with. At best, they come off as maudlin - pining for the glory days of pinball of yore.

The exploitation angle seemed especially unnecessary because there were also bunch of upbeat guys who were very personable. Roger Sharpe, in particular, stuck out as a really fun, intelligent, and down-to-earth guy. I could hang out with him all day.

I admit, we probably do get a good cross-section of the population, but I would have enjoyed hearing a lot more from some of the industry insiders and a lot less from a sad sack like "Pingeek" - he just wasn't that interesting. I wanted to learn a lot more about the history of pinball. I would have loved it if they had featured maybe a half dozen of the player's favorite tables and let them describe what they love about them. We got a tiny bit of this at one point with a Pirates of the Carribbean table from the table's designer. But that was it. It felt like a huge lost opportunity.

In all, I guess I would have prefered to see more of the actual excitement of pinball itself and less cultural examination.

The best parts of this movie felt completely ad-libbed. Like hanging out with your funniest friends while infiltrating a high school to take down a drug ring.

There is some extremely average comedy dialog in this movie. It made me feel like a cheap date even as I chuckled. So that's a letdown. But so much of this was either surprisingly, wonderfully offbeat like most of Rob Riggle's coach character dialog or felt unscripted like much of Channing Tatum's dialog. Tatum was uniformly excellent in this and his bonding with the nerds was, for me, one of the true highlights of the movie.

Even the end credits were funny as hell.

I applaud this "naturalistic" form of humor dialog that makes me feel as though I'm actually watching people make up funny lines as they go. It's a perfect pairing with the big, obvious gags. I've seen it cropping up now and then in the better Judd Apatow movies.

I enjoy the Abrams formula of high production value, great character interactions, dialog, and mysteries. Sometimes it's infurating, it's always full of plot holes you could stick John Holmes's dick into without getting it stuck, but it is generally a formula for excellent fun if you're willing to suspend disbelief and the logical portions of your mind. This Star Trek installment is no exception, and I think it's about as fun as a movie can be.

It's not a great movie. Heavens, no, that would require that it make sense, as a bare minimum! Along with a host of other glaring flaws.

But it is damned fun! It's hard to remember the last time I grinned so much while watching a movie.

It's bizarre that I enjoyed this comedy but almost never laughed while watching it. I guess you call these things "dramadies". It's witty in a self-aware sort of way that I guess is appropriate to this genre at this time in this particular movie.

The chuckles came almost exclusively from the incredibly great dialog given to Olive's parents. It's utterly dense with greatness. The rest of the dialog isn't nearly as even - some of it is good, some of it is not.

Character motivations were a big problem for me. I had a really hard time buying many of Olive's actions (even as she explained them) and those of her friends and classmates as well. I simply didn't understand the character Rhiannon (Olive's "best friend" played by Aly Michalka) at all and I still have no idea if I was supposed to be amused by her or simply hate her - or some combination of both.

I found Woodchuck Todd to be very likeable, so I perhaps didn't care too much that his actions throughout the movie were...is "unlikely" the right word? He's sort of like a gentleman deus ex machina - an abrupt solution to Olive's relationship problems that appears out of the blue. (Granted, it takes him a couple tries.)

Despite it's problems, the movie left me feeling pretty good and it was certainly well made. Stone was a bright spark throughout the whole thing with her huge, expressive eyes shooting waves of lethal energy like those sphinx statues in The Neverending Story.

QT is one of us! A superfan armed with the skill, money, and balls to create some of the greatest genre send-ups and homages ever created. He unchained the shit out of the western this time.

Sometimes I had no idea what was about to happen. Sometimes I saw it coming a mile away. Either way, I watched with perverted moviegoer relish each time the hammer dropped on some evil bastard. Pure cathartic glory spraying in crimson fountains diagonally across the screen and our minds.

I cannot fathom how it could be that I had never heard of a Francis Ford Coppola time travel movie staring Kathleen Turner and Nicolas Cage until I unearthed it by digging a little too deeply and greedily in the mines of Netflix and shoved it into my queue like I would a precious jewel into my adventurer's sack. Anyway, it arrived like a mysterious stranger in my mailbox one day and we watched it.

This is certainly one of the strangest movies I've seen. I'm not talking Eraserhead strange, but the sort of strange that can only occur when talented A-list people get together and perform a script that defies rational explanation. I'm not talking about a Primer explanation-defying script, but the kind of bizarre text that results when you take some really excellent ideas and some really bad ideas and some really excellent dialog and some really bad dialog and elements from five different genres and mash it all up in a shallow dirt trench, bury it for a year, and then dig it up to see what remains.

It's either: A brilliant meditation on how our choices and destinations in life are formed by our very nature wrapped up in a double-ended story which could be reality or a dream at either end; Or an ill-planned heap of sequences not meant for human eyes.

Almost the exact same thing can be said for Nicholas Cage's batshite insane acting. I wasn't sure if I was seeing the greatest oddball performance of a teen character ever filmed - or the first human interactions of a man raised to adulthood by wolves!

It's weird and disjointed, but in such a loving way (there are some really beautiful dramatic sequences, particularly those with Peggy Sue and her grandparents) and carefree spirit (Peggy Sue seems to treat the entire episode as her personal playground) that I learned to stop worrying and just love the bomb...err, story.

Scrupulously well scripted, well made, and well acted, it's a pretty faultless movie*.

So either you like the new direction of Bond or you don't. I do. Skyfall sets some very clear, specific stances:

The humor has become understated in a really, really good way. Ralph Feinnes shines especially bright here.

The moral ambiguity - always present in the series - is placed in a central role in this film. It permeates everything.

Javier Bardem radiates a frighteningly unhinged breed of malice, truly a great choice for this tortured villain.

Bond isn't exactly puritanical in Skyfall but he's very much focused on getting the job done rather than just slurping Scotch and busting a nut in or around some hot babes.

Most of all, it's a film that absolutely scoffs at sentimentality. Just count the number of times Bond and company discards some venerable old person, thing, or tradition in this movie. It happens again and again. I think the message is clear: we've given a wink and nod to the past, cleaned the slate, and we're ready for some new adventures.

Three things remain completely true to the original product: Walther handguns, Aston Martin automobiles, and beautiful high-budget style. There are some really incredible scenes in Skyfall in the great Bond tradition. Stunning.

* Well, the computer stuff is silly, but I accepted long ago that nobody understands computer security - especially Hollywood scriptwriters. It's blessedly unexplained and the details are unimportant to the movie anyway.

I pretty much knew exactly what to expect from this movie from the moment it started. I was mostly right, but when I was wrong, I was really happy to be wrong.

I'm really glad we had Jake Johnson's cynical, onanistic, and hilariously crass journalist character to guide us through this. He gave me laughs when I needed laughs. And he also had depth when I needed that. But not too much depth, 'cause this is a "quirky" comedy, after all.

<>Safety Not Guaranteed borders on deeply clichéd at times. But being clichéd is hardly a death sentence for a movie. It had what really matters: dramatic elements that ring true enough to want to invest in its characters and humorous situations that are genuinely funny.

It's not an incredibly funny movie, or incredibly clever, or incredibly deep. It's not incredibly anything. But it absolutely does succeed, I think, in delivering an amusing and thoughtful character-driven story.

And it actually "works" (as a time-travel narrative) far better than it would appear at first blush. That's the real surprise.

Wreck-It Ralph punches his was through a series of missed opportunities for cleverness and far too little real conflict.

You wrecked it, pal.

What this movie did have worked: a character I liked, decent supporting characters, and game-related visual and verbal jokes.

There just wasn't enough of anything. Not enough video game references. Not enough use of some of the featured characters - the entire troop of bad guys from "Bad-Anon" goes almost completely unused - why did we get introduced to these characters if they're never featured in any meaningful way later on? There are so many clever things they could have done with these guys.

Over the course of the movie, I found my favorite character in the unlikely: Jack McBrayer's Fix-It Felix ("Why do I fix everything I touch?") His earnestness was completely endearing and his fixing ability was used to good effect (though not as often as it might have been). But there wasn't nearly enough of that stuff.

I almost wonder if the writers an animators of Wreck-It Ralph have even played all that many games? There are so many clever game-related gags you could pack into a movie like this. Instead, they stuck with the most generic and obvious elements that just about anybody who has even walked into an arcade once in their lives could come up with in an afternoon. I expected ten times as much creativity.

I doubt too many people would actively dislike this movie (unless they hate games and/or animated movies), but I doubt it would blow anyone away, either. Which is a shame.

It starts a bit slow, I thought. But the laughs steadily escalate. I was chuckling pretty regularly for the whole last half.

They say that there aren't actors like this anymore. But I don't think that's the case. There are plenty of top-tier actors who could easily do this type of comedy. It's the audience that has changed. We would never accept this kind of wide-eyed enthusiastic goofiness in a modern comedy movie. At best, it would be a distracting anachronism. At worst it would be ridiculous. But because the movie belongs to the time in which it was made, we relax and enjoy it. (Now replay this entire paragraph, but imagine it as an argument for Monroe's fantastic jiggling skin-tight dresses.)

I love, love, love how Some Like It Hot ends. I'm sick to death of the standard comedy trope (particularly common in romantic comedies) in which someone uses lies to get close to someone they're attracted to and then we (the audience) have to go through the motions as the lie is uncovered and the lady-friend weeps over the betrayal. Every time we have to see that same fucking scene and I'm always thinking, "Jesus, is this a comedy or a goddamn relationship drama?" Well, when this movie ended I was so psyched about the conclusion that I wanted to leap from my seat and plunge fist-first like Superman through the ceiling and hover over the neighborhood and call out in a thunderous voice, "Look upon me people and hear my voice: Some Like It Hot ends well. Now you may return to your homes. Thank you."

]]>Dave GauerMessage got in the way of the moviehttp://letterboxd.com/ratfactor/list/message-got-in-the-way-of-the-movie/ letterboxd-list-26290Sat, 31 Mar 2012 19:01:00 +1300Hey, that's totally awesome that your movie has a message. But I'm not three years old. If it's there, I'll pick it up.

Interweave it in the story and I'll remember your movie for a week, shove it down my throat and I'll hate your movie forever.